34-button Google calculator now appears in search results

Google search has had a calculator (of sorts) built in for years now, but things just reached a new level of nerdiness over in Mountain View. When you Google any mathematical operation, Google will give you the results along with a big 34-button calculator.

In the past, Google’s back end calculations were provided in a small box at the top of the results. The calculator includes operations for standard arithmetic, as well as some geometric functions. You also get dedicated buttons for everyone’s favorite irrational numbers, pi and e. At present, the only way to pull up the calculator is to trigger it with a search. Something like 2+2 will certainly do it, but you could also type something out, like “square root of 42.”

All the search results are still down below the calculator, and none of this changes if you start using the new interface to work out some more figures. You can copy results out of the calculator, but it doesn’t look like you can paste in for some reason. That limits the usefulness for me.

Google’s twitter account recently announced that a new version of the algorithm was rolling out, but it’s unclear if the calculator is connected. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was originally developed for Chrome OS, which relies on web resources for just about everything. But why not make Google searches a little more awesome for everyone? It’s not incredibly useful, but it’s cool and not the kind of thing you’d see other search engines rolling out.